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Yasuhiro (Hiro to his friends, Yasuhiro to his debt collectors) liked soju.
Ever since he had gotten a bottle of it at the bodega down the street thinking it was spring water, only to take a big swig after he had gotten home and gagged on the burning gasoline-levels of alcohol, he couldn’t get enough. It was all thanks to his inability to read the Hangul on the label.
He held the lime glass bottle and sat hunched forward in his apartment complex’s one and only designated smoking pavilion, a creaky old gazebo constructed of split pine boards and spit. Hiro always thought it was funny how the only place a resident could (legally) light up was in the confines of the single-most flammable set piece on the property. Hiro knew better than to play by that; he was more of a ‘toke up and exhale in an empty paper towel roll with dryer sheets wadded up in the end’ kind of guy.
Not that Hiro was high or crossfaded at the moment. It was one ‘those’ nights. Getting high always made him think too much, but getting drunk made him think too little. Hiro really needed to make himself stupid right now to take the edge off.
Two hours prior he had screamed himself awake, his sheets violently rustling against his thrashing limbs.
Hiro held the bottle of soju in his hands. He felt the force of an impact and the recoil of glass striking the back of a skull. The sound was a wobbling thud, not a sharp crack like in the movies.
Grinding his teeth, Hiro tipped back and chased down a few shot-sized gulps. Soju rinsed his throat in what felt like magma. He was too sloshed to care and too taken up with letting his brain turn off. He swayed from side to side, the rocking making his head less sicky and more just fuzzy.
He didn’t even know what time it was. Two AM? Three? He had work tomorrow, he knew that, which meant he’d have to either call out or ask if Hajime could take the wheel and let him nurse his shitty hangover. Hajman was a chill guy. He’d get it either way.
There wasn’t much in the way of public lighting around the complex, but at least the smoking pavilion had one flickering mounted lamplight going for it. It was probably a deterrent for the usual bits of residential tomfoolery. What better place was there to make out or make a drug deal than a shitty little wooden gazebo?
But, thankfully, Hiro was alone. He hadn’t seen a soul in the hour since he had stumbled out of the main apartment lobby with nothing but a cashmere leopard print robe wrapped around his waist and the ketchup-stained boxers hiked over his hips. He made sure to wear his favorite slippers outside, the ones with rabbit ears and beady eyes that stared up at him whenever he glanced down. It was silly, but they always took the edge off the loneliness when he got like this.
Yeah, he looked like a hot mess. It didn’t matter. It was two (or three) AM in the middle of September. It wasn’t bone chillingly cold, but it was chilly enough to deter most night-walkers from going out.
The view from the pavilion wasn’t anything to write home about. At a healthy fifty yards from the main building it mostly just overlooked the parking lot. A swarm of cars laid dormant before Hiro’s eyes, sleeping giants that reflected the moonlight in a way that looked, at least to him, almost beautiful.
Crickets were his friends of the night. Hiro watched as a single dusty moth battered its wings against the mounted lamp. He sighed and took another drink.
When Hiro drank, he drank to get his body as blacked out as possible. It was like tool-assisted meditation. Sometimes incense wouldn’t cut it. Divine intervention only went so far.
He caught a flash of movement from the corner of his eye. Someone was easing open the main building’s door and shuffling outside, someone lanky and bundled up in a tweed coat that looked three sizes too big. No, wait. That was Hajime’s coat. Hiro remembered him having worn it to work earlier that morning, but last he remembered Hajime didn’t have long white hair.
“Oh, wait…” He muttered to himself, feeling the cogs of his juiced-up brain try and churn out an explanation before it hit him. “Yeah. Remnant guy.” Komaeda.
Hiro watched as Komaeda came down the sidewalk that hugged the parking lot and bridged the gap between the army of cars and the smoking pavilion. It was weird. Komaeda always had this creepy ghostly look about him. Very occult-like. He had once brought it up to Hajime on one of their morning commutes to Branch 14.
Hajime had told him to put in a sock in it (not as delicately as that, but whatever).
As Komaeda got closer, Hiro raised an arm and waved. “Hey, Remnant!” he drawled out. He could hear his own voice bounce off the walls of the cars and the building.
He heard Komaeda’s soft gasp and saw his shoulders jolt up in surprise. “Yasuhiro?” His voice was more hushed, but the sound carried. “Is that you?”
Hiro cringed. “Nah, man. Just Hiro. Not even my mom calls me that six-syllabic mish mash bullshit.” He could hear the slur of his own speech, but he was way too lost in the sauce to care. “Get over here.”
Komaeda’s face was half-shadowed in darkness, but at least his shoulders dipped back down and looked more relaxed. “That’s two syllables too many.” Hiro could hear the smile in his voice.
“Too late for anyone to be all smarty-pants around here.” Hiro waved an arm and chased the last dregs of his soju. “What’re you doin’ out?”
“Forgot something in the car,” Komaeda said. He reached the gazebo and paused at the foot of the two steps leading inside. His face looked even more occultish in the lamplight, all buttery and blanched. Hiro noticed that his eyes were a kind of watery grey. They were wide as he looked Hiro up and down with a guardedly polite smile. “Are you alright?” he finally asked.
Hiro snorted and sat the empty soju bottle between his feet. “S’all good here, man. Just vibing. UFO-watching.” Never mind that the gazebo had a roof and even if it didn’t, the light pollution kept the sky from being anything but a washed-out grey horizon. “Why ask somethin’ like that?”
“Well, you’re drinking outside in a robe at three AM.” Komaeda stepped up onto the gazebo’s landing, his hand (the cool robot one) clutched the front of Hajime’s coat and kept it closed. Dude was definitely shivering. His grin turned wry. “That’s a little concerning, don’t you think?”
“Meh.” Hiro blew a raspberry. “Insomnia is, like, the number one thing people have. If anything, it’s more concerning if people aren’t insomnians, know what I mean?”
Komaeda chuckled. “Got me there, but you still didn’t answer my question.” He took the seat opposite of Hiro and clasped his hands over his stomach, very polite-like.
“Man, why do you care?” Hiro sniffed and stuffed a hand down one of his robe’s many pockets. He took out a tarot deck he had stashed away (one of at least a dozen) and started to clumsily shuffle them. “You like, barely know me. Don’t you live with Hajman?”
“Last I checked, yes.” Komaeda crossed his legs and Hiro noticed that he was wearing some loose-fitting lounge pants. “We’re married. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.” Hiro shrugged and left it at that. It was funnier to feign ignorance on stuff like that. Doing a bit of good-natured clowning never hurt anyone. He fumbled with his tarot deck and slipped out a random card. He turned it over and, squinting, just barely made out a reversed Knight of Swords. Fitting. “Sorry, just joking. I know.”
“It’s okay,” Komaeda said. His voice was a soft rasp. “Can’t sleep?”
Hiro pressed the side of his fist to his lips as he stifled a belch, cradling the tarot deck in one hand. “Eh. You know. Just.” He waved a hand and screwed his eyes shut. His skull felt very heavy. “Sometimes I think about it, you know? Like. Hajime doesn’t talk about it much and like, I don’t wanna push but. Everything still happened. I almost died, you know?”
Komaeda’s polite smile turned a little sad. “Hiro, you’re drunk.”
And Hiro just kept going. He didn’t care. “Fuck, man like. I tried to kill someone and like. I kept trying to convince myself it was like, self-defense, but… fuck, man. I dunno. I think about it a lot. It fucks up my sleep.”
“Have you had any water today?”
“You’d think I woulda gotten over it by now but like. I don’t know, man. It just kinda hangs out in my brain full time. Like. Sometimes I like being able to pay my way to not having to have roommates but it gets too fuckin’ quiet, you know?”
Komaeda stood back up. “I’m going to get you a glass of water, okay?”`
“No!” Hiro held his tarot deck so tightly that the cardstock creaked. "You don’t gotta do that. M’good.”
“Alright.” But Komaeda didn’t sit back down. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
Hiro didn’t make a comment. That was the thing about being sloshed. He just couldn’t begin to care about anything, let alone the activities of some guy he only knew tangentially.
He refocused back on his tarot cards as Komaeda walked away, his footsteps quickly lost in a din of cawing cicadas.
Yeah, he’d have to call out tomorrow for sure. His head was already starting to feel achy.
He pulled another card. This time it was The Tower.
“Aw, now you’re just fucking with me.” Hiro scoffed and stuffed the deck back into his robe’s pocket. No more of that. For whatever reason, the Occult was way more active at night.
Hiro’s perception of time must have been severely skewed, because it seemed like no time at all passed before Komaeda had reappeared at the foot of the pavilion steps with a cup in his not-as-cool not-robot hand.
“Here.” He stepped up with a quiet huff and offered a glass of plain water to Hiro. “It’ll help.”
“Thanks.” Hiro took it and held it on his lap. He didn’t move to drink it. “Uh, sorry. Didn’t mean to, you know, fuck up your night.” He felt stupid saying that, but he didn’t know how else to articulate it.
Komaeda’s car keys jangled in his robot hand. His expression was ever-polite and civil. “No worries. Just, ah, make sure you give Hajime the glass back whenever you drop by or carpool or whatnot,” he said. “It’s part of a set.”
“Kay.” Hiro made a mental note to make sure not to let his butterfingers slip up and drop the damn thing. The phrase ‘part of a set’ had way too many ominously expensive implications. “Still, uh. Thanks.”
“Sure.” Komaeda backed away. He glanced out at the parking lot and back to Hiro, his fingers holding the coat closed. “Do you do this a lot?”
“Do what?”
Komaeda sighed. “Wake up and come out here.”
“Nah,” Hiro lied. “Just didn’t wanna be in an enclosed space after one of the usual nightmares. Get some fresh air.” Never mind that he could still smell the chases of tobacco from the butts littered around the gazebo’s floorboards, but whatever. “I’m good.”
“Alright.” Straightening himself up, Komaeda went back to the stairs. “Have a good night, Hiro.” It was one of those false pleasantries, the kind you give a stranger. “I’ll tell Hajime that you probably won’t be up to carpooling tomorrow morning.”
“Thanks, man.” Hiro watched him leave and melt into a row of parked cars, his candlewax hair tailing behind him.
Hiro didn’t really keep track of the time after that. At some point, when a pinkish hue began to bleed into the horizon, he stood and ambled back inside.
He drank the water.